


back and forth from new york

by avengercarol



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes Remembers, Bucky Barnes-centric, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Introspection, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 20:20:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21326098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avengercarol/pseuds/avengercarol
Summary: After losing everyone and everything that connected him to his past, Bucky searches for a new idea of home in an unfamiliar time.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers
Kudos: 11





	back and forth from new york

**Author's Note:**

> this was completely inspired by the picture of bucky's dog tags and the fact that the falcon and the winter soldier is filming at a dock
> 
> title from daylight by taylor swift

There was something about the feeling of returning home that couldn’t be replicated. No matter how long he’s been away, how far he’s been, how much he’s changed, home is always there, always constant. It’s always waiting, ready to accept him back.

Maybe home isn’t a place. At least, not a building with rooms and walls and endless memories of a childhood left behind. Maybe home is a city. A labyrinth of streets and skyscrapers intertwining in a map that he couldn’t see but has still somehow memorized like the back of his hand. 

For Bucky, Brooklyn would always be home, no matter how long it had been, or where he’d been, or who he had become. Time had changed the city, but it had also changed him. There was no way either of them could go back to how things had been, back when he was young, careless, and hopeful, before the truths of the world revealed themselves and showed how unkind fate could be. 

Because maybe he wasn’t little Jamie Barnes, running through the streets with Steve and his sisters, trying not to get into trouble. Maybe he wasn’t Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, leaving his world behind for a war he always knew he wouldn’t come back from. Maybe he wasn’t the Winter Soldier, the numb assassin who hadn’t been allowed to know what home was, let alone that he had had one and it had been taken away.

But he was Bucky Barnes, and he had finally returned.

\- 

It had taken a long time for him to return home, much longer than he would have liked. But, there was a certain privilege in his ability to return. Once he had been drafted, as soon as the notice came in the mail, he had known he would never see home again. He had known he would never see the streets he grew up on, the people he had known, or the places he liked to visit ever again.

And he was right. Brooklyn as he knew it was gone, forever. 

The streets had changed. His friends, his coworkers, his family, they were all gone, living their lives without him, without even knowing that he was still out there, waiting for someone, anyone, to realize he was still alive. The dancehalls and bars he had frequented during his youth had all closed up, paving the way for trendy destinations for tourists to stop by.

But there was one place, one sole location in the city that hadn’t been changed, at least not in the way everything else had been altered.

Working at the docks hadn’t been a glamorous job, or even a job would’ve said he really, truly wanted to have. It had been a job he had picked up out of necessity, in order to survive. When the Great Depression hit, it hit hard. He had only been a child, barely even a teenager when the stock market first crashed, but that hadn’t mattered. As the years went by, he found himself growing increasingly desperate for a job, especially once Steve moved in with him. He was no longer trying to find a means to ensure the survival of one person, but also that of his best friend, the most important person in his world. 

So, when he had been offered a job at the docks, he took it. The hours were long, the work was hard, but the pay was enough to keep him and Steve afloat, able to pay for rent and for food and for medicine when Steve fell ill and had been unable to work.

Out of the entire city, the docks were what remained stable.

At least, they were what remained in Bucky’s mind. Maybe it was because they were the one place where he was strictly focusing on working, not on pleasure or enjoyment. He had made friends out of his co-workers, he was an easy guy to get along with, most would say. But the docks were never somewhere he would have called home, not back in the 40’s, not when his priorities were centered on trying to convince Steve to have some fun and go out dancing and focus on anything other than the war on the other side of the Atlantic. 

Perhaps it was that separation, that ability to realize that there was one part of his life that wasn’t changed, that couldn’t be changed because he had never felt completely connected to it in the first place, that allowed him to cling onto the docks as the last remains of a home he had lost. A home that, although it was still there, was not how he remembered it.

-

Returning to Brooklyn had been Bucky’s choice. It would always be Bucky’s choice, ‘til the end of the line.

After Project Insight and the fall of Hydra, he hadn’t been able to return home. At first, it was due to him not remembering what, or where, home was. Sure, once he’d visited the Smithsonian and had a fundamental understanding of who he was, who he had been, he’d known, in some sense, that he was from Brooklyn, had grown up there, had a life there, but it didn’t feel right. After he had regained some of memories during the long nights he spent waiting for someone to find him, he began to remember his childhood, his adolescence, and the real life he had begun within the city, but at that point, he also knew it wouldn’t be safe.

Someone had to be looking for him, he just didn’t know if he wanted to be found. 

So, he ran. He ran as far he could to the far corners of the globe, searching for a new home, a new place that could well and truly be his, that no one would be able to take from him the way he had been forced to abandon Brooklyn.

Next was Bucharest. It hadn’t necessarily been bad, but it also wasn’t good, at least, not good enough to call home. He had his own apartment, the first space he could truly call his in nearly seventy years, but it wasn’t enough. Home had to be somewhere where he wasn’t constantly looking over his shoulder, waiting for someone to find him, to turn him in, to turn him back into the Winter Soldier. Home was somewhere that he didn’t have to hide his backpack, his memories under a floorboard, ready to quickly be grabbed in case someone broke in, ready to leave with him at a moment’s notice. 

And he had left at a moment’s notice, throwing the backpack out the window and running across the nearby rooftops to try to escape, to remain a free man for as long as he could. First, he escaped the apartment, leaving that idea of home behind, then he escaped the prison he had been trapped in, causing himself and his allies to become fugitives, he escaped one fight and another, and eventually ended up in Wakanda, an official visitor at the request of the king.

Truthfully, Wakanda was the closest Bucky had felt to home in seven decades. Of course, it was nothing like Brooklyn, nothing like the city he had grown up in, but that was the beauty of it. The intricate details of a palace, the beauty of the landscape, and the ability to be free of the triggers that plagued his mind and prevented him from feeling safe for all those years he had spent on the run. There was an essence of peace, of serenity, that surrounded him while he was there. It was the essence of hope, of possibility for a new life, to find a new home with Steve. It was the possibility of getting back what had been so forcefully taken away from him.

Until it was gone, and the possibility faded into nothing more than an optimistic daydream, as he was removed from existence once again, only to return and find out everything had changed, and it could never go back to what it had once been. 

Brooklyn had been Bucky’s home, but Steve had always been the one that made him feel welcomed there. That changed, drastically, when Steve left. When Steve took the stones and everything Bucky had ever known back to the 40s, to a time Bucky had left behind and thought he would never be able to get back.

At first, Bucky thought he would’ve done anything to go back with Steve, to live out his life with his best friend in the time they were supposed to be in, able to forget all that had harmed them in the years since the war.

It took time for him to realize how wrong that was. How wrong he was to wish to go back to that time. It wasn’t the time period he missed after all, it was the people, and the places, and the idea of home. And there was nothing stopping him, no warrant, no search party, that could stop him from finding a new home, one that would never be taken from him, no matter what. 

So, Bucky returned to Brooklyn. He returned to the docks where he had once worked. The single aspect of his former home that had never changed.

-

It was a chilly day in November when Bucky finally returned. He wanted to do it right, at the right moment, with the right plan.

At some point, over the years since it had been revealed that he was alive, that he hadn’t been killed in the Alps after falling from a moving train, someone had found his dog tags. In all honesty, Bucky couldn’t remember if he had been wearing them when he fell. He hoped that he hadn’t, because that meant that they had been sent to one of his family members, or that Steve had kept them all those years. It meant that when he had returned, someone who knew him, really knew him, decided to give him back a part of himself he had once lost. If he had been wearing them the day he fell; however, it meant that they had been stolen from Hydra, that for years, decades, people had had a way to identify him, to know that he was a soldier, a man, and had done nothing to set him free.

Either way, he had the dog tags now, safely tucked into his pocket as he stood at the docks, gazing out into the cold water. He could feel the raised letters and numbers against the fingers on his right hand, using touch to memorize the words forever ingrained in the metal. 

His name, James B. Barnes, a reminder of who he was.

His serial number, 32557038, a reminder of what they tried to turn him into; a soldier, nameless, with nothing but those numbers to rattle off until they broke him.

His next of kin, R. Barnes, a reminder of his sister, the closest friend he had ever had other than Steve, who had lived a full life, never knowing what had actually happened to her brother, never knowing what he had been turned into.

His birthplace, and his next of kin’s current address, 3092 Stockton Rd. Shelbyville, Indiana, a reminder of his first home, a place he had never felt connected to, as he had been too young to remember it before his family had moved to New York, but that Becca had insisted on moving back to, wanting to escape the busy city life he had grown to love.

Pulling to chain out of his pocket, Bucky stared long and hard at the small piece of metal between his fingers. The tags only served as a reminder of who he once was, and who he could never be again.

It had taken some time, but Bucky realized he did not want to be the person he had been when he had received those tags. He had grown, he had changed, and he accepted that he couldn’t back in time and reclaim the life he had lost. He wanted to see what the future had in store for him, after taking so long to get there.

Taking one last look at the dog tags, Bucky held them out over the sea. The sun danced across the metal, highlighting different letters of the person he used to be.

Slowly, Bucky released the chain, watching as the dog tags fell into the water with a small splash, before sinking down to the bottom.

Maybe one day someone would find them, and wonder what had prompted James B. Barnes to release such a crucial part of his identity. Maybe they would assume he had been too ashamed of his past as the Winter Soldier to accept who he had been before that.

But maybe, hopefully, they would understand his desire, his need, to move on, to start fresh.

As Bucky walked away from the docks, he didn’t feel like he was turning his back on his past, but rather that he was moving toward his future.

Just because Brooklyn had changed didn’t mean it wasn’t still home. The streets might not have been exactly how Bucky remembered them to be, the people might have been gone, and the businesses might have been replaced, but they weren’t everything that made the city, and they especially weren’t everything that made it his home.

Home was a feeling. It was an idea of belonging that couldn’t be replicated anywhere else in the world. It was an idea that while he was there, maybe, just maybe, everything would turn out alright.

As Bucky left the docks and returned to the city, on his way to meet Sam and Sharon, not for a mission, or because they felt compelled to, but because they all genuinely enjoyed the others’ company, he knew everything would be just the way it should be.

After all, Bucky was home.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr @sharoncartar


End file.
